Building Relationships
LinkedIn’s analytics will help power data tools for Microsoft’s Dynamics, which competes with Salesforce in helping companies manage relationships with their customers.
While Nadella and Weiner had spoken many times about partnerships, they first met to discuss a potential acquisition deal in February. LinkedIn had just given a lower-than-expected revenue forecast that caused its stock to fall more than 40 percent in a day.
“In that very first meeting, we both got excited as we were brainstorming and riffing a bit about the things we could do in combination, combining the world’s professional network and the world’s professional cloud,” Weiner said in an interview Monday.
Deal Dinners
What piqued Weiner’s interest most was Nadella’s idea for the structure of the organization -- that LinkedIn could continue to operate independently like Facebook’s WhatsApp or Google’s YouTube but still rely on Microsoft for a boost in potential customers. In April, several executives met for dinner, where they spent the evening discussing ways they could make their technologies work in concert. Attendees included the CEOs, as well as LinkedIn Chairman Reid Hoffman and Microsoft executive Qi Lu, who had worked with Weiner at Yahoo! Inc., according to people familiar with the matter.
A dinner Sunday night with both executive teams was more casual, with an icebreaker game to deepen their relationship. The attendees were asked to share something about themselves that was not on their LinkedIn profiles, the people said.